Mac 101: ZIP files for easy e-mail

Hm, I've had trouble with this lately. Been trying to compress a large amount of photos, and I get an error on every try.

I may try it through quicksilver, unless it's just the same process.

I knew about this in Tiger and also the change to "compress" in Leopard, but it does not seem useful. I cant send a 20 MB file via email, nor can I send the 19.5 MB "compressed" Zip file.... Am I missing a step here ?

The best alternative I can think of has to be quicksilver.

Select your files (use , for multiple files).

Select the compress action.

Quicksilver now creates the archive and reopens with the zip-file selected.

Select the compose email action (or send directly).

Select the recipient (or again, use , for multiples).

A 10 second job!

hint:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071029071230867

This hint describes how to compress using formats other than ZIP, all within the Finder:



How's that for 101 for ya?

You don't have to compress folders in order to send ZIP files through Mail – just drag-and-drop your folder to a message (or on Mail icon in Dock) and Mail will automatically compress it to foldername.zip when sending.

I've used the "create archive" feature a few times, but it never seems to make much of a dent in the file size. Is there a way to increase the compression?

Zip files are all well and good for sharing with Windows users, but generally tar/bzip2 and gzip are much better for UNIX (and therefore Mac) systems. I don't use Finder and much prefer drag and drop, anyway, so I wrote my own compression app. http://lipidity.com/software/zippit/

How can this be done on a MacBook Pro - which has no right click mouse?

Congrats for becoming a TUAW blogger - but i'm not really sure that this item is blog-worthy? Its not a new feature - its been around for years. I'm sure its useful to someone ... but it seems a bit out of keeping with what TUAW normally posts.